Once upon a time people spoke the same language - but that was long ago. Nowadays people speak hundreds of languages with unique characters, inflection indicators, and other punctuation marks that make each language different from all others.

Prior to the advent of the computer and the breakdown of geographic travel barriers, there was little need to transform information from one language to another. Now we have a truly global information need - one that must to be localized for the particular consumer, and that must take into account the local preferences. For example, is the information read from left to right, right to left, or across or down? Does the information fit the formatting after translation, or does the formatting need to be adjusted? Are proper names inadvertently offensive in a different language? These are just some of the issues that occur when we try to rebuild the Tower of Babel and make information a global commodity once again.

Our cover story for this issue is "Internationalization of a J2EE Web Application." Authors Murali Kashaboina and Bin Liu present a practical solution to making Web applications multilingual. Just as in the aforementioned allegory, languages have different characters and encoding schemes, so application real estate has to be managed. Internationalization is an attempt to move the "language-specific" content to places where it can be conveniently managed. This thorough article provides insight into the design for internationalization, which the authors state, "should be an up-front task and not an afterthought."

Michael Poulin explains how to achieve reliable messaging via Web services and JMS in his article "Assured Delivery of Audit Data." He describes two techniques for assuring the delivery of important data in distributed systems, and emphasizes how significant assured delivery is "in light of global operation risk regulations and related application risk management."

Michael Havey's article "Business Process Execution Language for Java" also delves into the subject of languages by examining a popular language for the definition and execution of business processes and its Java extension. The article is excerpted from Michael's book Essential Business Process Modeling, and those who wish to know more about the subject would do well to read it.

Deepak Vohra and Ajay Vohra present a tutorial on "Configuring Eclipse for Remote Debugging a WebLogic Application." The article takes readers through the preliminary setup, through developing a WebLogic Application, configuring a remote debugging configuration in Eclipse, and finally, remote debugging an application.

Raman Sud offers readers lessons from the world of manufacturing in his article "Design for Production Meets the Application Delivery Process." He ponders what sort of criteria might be applicable to assessing the comparative health of an application delivery system with regard to "design for production" standards. The article considers centralizing all configuration artifacts, gauging changes as an application progresses across the life cycle, the definition and enforcement of standards with regard to changes in the IT infrastructure stack, the elimination of wasted effort, and relative consistency.

In "Avoiding Middle-Aged Spread for Your Infrastructure," Peter Holditch shares his observations about the onset of mid life for both people - and applications. He compares how things functioned in the early days of each, and what they have matured into since.

Deepak Batra shows readers techniques for "Adding Self-Detection and Auto-Optimization to the WebLogic 8.1 Platform" and offers solutions from his own professional experience.

We hope you will enjoy this issue's focus on global communication, and have a wonderful holiday season - wherever in the world you are!